Ernesto Neto
Park Avenue Armory, New York, USA
Ernesto Neto, Anthropodino (2009). Photograph © James Ewing. Image courtesy of Park Avenue Armory
Park Avenue Armory’s vast drill hall, a product of New York’s Gilded Age largesse, is one of the city’s grandest utilitarian interiors. Those who go there are most familiar with the building as the site of periodic art and design trade shows, where one’s gaze is fixed on Picasso prints or Saarinen tulip chairs or whatever else resides within the ground-level confines of temporary booths. So one of the primary pleasures of Ernesto Neto’s Anthropodino (2009), which occupies this big barn of a space with multidirectional aplomb, is the symbiotic floor-to-ceiling relationship between installation and host structure. (Sci-fi parallels such as egg sacs of supersized insects, webs and alien inhabitation are among the things that spring to mind at first sight.)
A single, stitched expanse of Lycra tulle - for years the artist’s medium of choice - is stretched over a low-lying warren of arched tunnels and is drawn upwards toward the ceiling, where it hovers dramatically like a billowing supercell storm cloud. Tubes of fabric, flung over the building’s wrought-iron rafters and threaded down through occasional portals, counterbalance the whole affair, weighted down at their ends with pounds and pounds of powdered spices such as turmeric, cloves and red pepper. Some hang almost all the way down to the ground like stained, curry-scented punch-bags, where viewers sniff and poke at them gingerly. Visitor engagement is courted with even more charm and insistence elsewhere: there’s a giant community beanbag, a cosy red-hued den supplied with tiny chamomile-stuffed pillows, and - no joke - a large ball pit. If the proverbial blind men paid a visit to Anthropodino they would have much to debate.
Curated by Tom Eccles (moonlighting from his day job as Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies), the project is the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy’s first foray into a series of annual commissions approaching the grand scale of the ‘Unilever Series’ in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Neto - whose global success over the past decade has resulted in vast numbers of pendulous, biomorphic, spice-filled architectural inhabitations - is both an elegant choice and a very safe bet. Word of Anthropodino’s fun-loving, playground appeal seems to have spread quickly, and on one weekday morning the installation was the happy province of preschoolers and middle-aged Manhattanites, whose interaction with the work seemed much the same. They wandered through its pastel-tinted corridors into the central, cathedral-domed chamber, stuck their hands through holes that dotted the diaphanous walls, and marvelled at the transparent divisions between interior and exterior realms.
Such communal wonder is clearly just what Neto has in mind; his title choice suggests that, as they enter, people become part of a larger, hybrid organism. In his desire to invite and stimulate social interaction through his artistic practice, Neto is often compared to fellow Brazilians Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, yet the more his work ventures into the formal territory of super-engineered, organized fantasy, the less accurate that comparison seems. (One wonders what those two elders would have done with such big-budget, large-scale shows.) Complex in design and downright beautiful in its crafty execution, Anthropodino is the sort of diffuse, undemanding art that requires little more than sensual engagement to function at full capacity. Best to admire the way it frames and shrouds its austere 19th-century surroundings, take temporary sanctuary in its theatrical dens, spy on others doing the same and then leave the magic kingdom behind.
Anne Wehr
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